from the dangerous-and-stupid dept

Every so often, people who don't really understand the importance of anonymity or how it enables free speech (especially among marginalized people), think they have a brilliant idea: "just end real anonymity online." They don't seem to understand just how shortsighted such an idea is. It's one that stems from the privilege of being in power. And who knows that particular privilege better than members of the House of Lords in the UK -- a group that is more or less defined by excess privilege? The Communications Committee of the House of Lords has now issued a report concerning "social media and criminal offenses" in which they basically recommend scrapping anonymity online. It's not a true "real names" proposal -- as the idea is that web services would be required to collect real names at signup, but then could allow those users to do things pseudonymously or anonymously. But, still, their actions could then easily be traced back to a real person if the "powers that be" deemed it necessary. Here's the key bit:

From our perspective in the United Kingdom, if the behaviour which is currently criminal is to remain criminal and also capable of prosecution, we consider that it would be proportionate to require the operators of websites first to establish the identity of people opening accounts but that it is also proportionate to allow people thereafter to use websites using pseudonyms or anonymously. There is little point in criminalising certain behaviour and at the same time legitimately making that same behaviour impossible to detect. We recognise that this is a difficult question, especially as it relates to jurisdiction and enforcement.

The report notes that the findings are "tentative" and that these recommendations might possibly "be an undesirably chilling step towards tyranny," but they don't seem that concerned about it, or they wouldn't have made the general recommendation in the first place.

There is a long list of problems with such a proposal, beyond the obvious questions of how you would possibly enforce it and what the various chilling effects would be. But let's take it one step further and note the fallacy of the very premise made in the report: that without such requirements it is "impossible to detect" who did an action online deemed to be illegal. We've been dealing with this issue forever. A decade ago, we reported on the various freakouts over open WiFi and how it would "allow" anyone to commit crimes online and make it "impossible" to find them. And yet, time after time, we noted examples of basic detective work allowing police to track down the criminals.

Yes, without being forced to first identify yourself, it might make the police work a bit more difficult, but never impossible. Take a similar situation in the physical world. Anyone can walk into a store or a bank and hold it up. And they can do it without identifying themselves at the door before coming in. It happens all the time. Police have no official identity to work with, but they do have other clues -- fingerprints, video, photos, the clerk's memory -- to work off of and can piece together who committed the crime. The same is true of people online. Even if they don't identify themselves upfront, they frequently leave plenty of clues that allow law enforcement to figure out who they are.

So the very premise that this is somehow necessary is pretty much eliminated. Then combine it with all of the downsides that we already know about: chilling effects, the end of important anonymity, potential privacy violations and leaks and more. What you're left with is a horrible idea all around.

from the can't-have-your-pot-and-smoke-it-too dept

Via Eric Goldman, we learn of a case in Pennsylvania where a group of six Bucknell students were trying to sue some officials at the University for unlawaful search relating to a drug bust and subsequent disciplinary action at their frat house (and some other residences). The interesting tidbit here is that the plaintiffs asked the court to keep their names a secret throughout the case. Their argument was not that they needed to be kept secret from the defendants -- who already knew exactly who they were -- but rather that since the discipline was done confidentially, to sue publicly would out these students as being disciplined over drug possession -- and that might harm their reputations.

The court however, completely rejects this request, noting the importance of open and public court procedures. While it does admit that there are cases where plaintiffs are allowed to proceed under pseudonyms, that tends to be in cases where to come forward would put them in direct danger -- not direct danger of being publicly associated with things they actually did. Basically, the court notes that while it may be embarrassing for this information to end up on the web, these guys are adults who made their own choices, and keeping the fact that you were busted with drugs secret is quite different from keeping information secret to avoid being thrown in an Iranian prison:

There is no potential for serious harm to Plaintiffs in the case at bar. There are also no special circumstances that would justify an exception to one of the hallmarks of the American democracy, the openness of our courts. This is not a case involving "abortion, birth control, transexuality, mental illness, welfare rights of illegitimate children, AIDS, and homosexuality." ... The only harm to Plaintiffs is that which they identified — the embarrassment of possession of contraband and that news media outlets may discuss the story, which will then live in perpetuity through web searches on the internet.

The Megless/Provident Life/Citizens for a Strong Ohio factors certainly mitigate against Plaintiffs arguments in favor of anonymity. Plaintiffs here are not children, but adults who have left the nest to explore the world; albiet, the semi-sheltered world of college life at a private, small, expensive liberal arts college in rural Pennsylvania.

Bucknell kept the students disciplinary record confidential; Plaintiffs have therefore been protected from public disclosure up to this point. However, the Bucknell's desire to protect its students has no bearing on the instant proceedings. The public has no compelling need to protect the identities of adults alleging Fourth Amendment violations (to be contrasted with the use of pseudonyms for sexual assault victims, the public has a compelling need to protect identities to promote disclosure by these victims). Moreover, this case does not involve private medical information; a risk to Plaintiffs of future imprisonment in the Peoples Republic of China, the Islamic Republic of Iran, or even in the United States; nor does it involve the threat of loss of the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment.

Basically, the 4th Amendment issues may be worth exploring, but there's no compelling argument for keeping their names out of the case. Just because their names -- and the associated actions -- may "live in perpetuity through web searches on the internet," that's no reason to allow them to stay anonymous.

from the free-speech-bullies dept

Earlier this month, David Kravets over at Ars Technica, wrote about a questionable order from Judge Marsha Pechman, allowing nutritional supplement firm Ubervita to issue a subpoena to identify a bunch of negative reviewers on Amazon and Craigslist. The order was not only premature, but incredibly broad:

We were concerned, however, because the early discovery had been authorized even though the motion was exceptionally bareboned, without any showing of legal and evidentiary merit, as required by the Dendrite rule, and because Ubervita’s moving papers, and Judge Pechman’s early discovery order, had been maddeningly unspecific about which critical comments were the subject of Ubervita’s claims of product disparagement and unfair competition. The complaint itself cited a couple of adverse comments but went on to allege that there were many other criticisms, unspecified, whose authors were Doe defendants. This unspecificity violated the prong of the Dendrite test that requires the precise actionable words to be spelled out.

Even more troubling was the fact that Ubervita was using the ruling to intimidate any new negative reviewers, posting comments in response to negative reviews, claiming that the reviews were libelous, that it had already filed a lawsuit about other commenters and that the court had allowed the names to be subpoenaed. One comment notes:

On July 2nd, 2014, we filed suit in Federal Court in Washington State to subpoena various websites for the identities of our attackers. The attacks have gone far beyond these anonymous bad-mouthings and 1-star reviews. While we won't elaborate on that issue here, you can Google it or search the Justia.com legal search engine website to see it. It was just filed today, so it may take a few days to propagate those search engines.

To our attackers: you should probably stop before you get into a lot of legal trouble.

As Levy notes, this use of the broad order to intimidate other commenters is quite problematic:

Even worse, Ubervita had started invoking Judge Pechman’s decision to post responses to critical comments, including comments made AFTER the lawsuit was filed which therefore could not have been alleged in the lawsuit to be false and defamatory, warning that Ubervita was suing its critics and inviting commenters to conduct a Google search to learn about the case – presumably, directing them to the Ars Technica article that warned of the supposed “unmasking” order. (I have linked above to PDF's of the threatening comments, not to the comments on Amazon's site, because Amazon has been removing them).

Once Levy contacted Ubervita's lawyer, Mike Atkins, the company promised to limit the subpoena being sent to Amazon to just trying to target those that the company believes are really from an Ubervita competitor. Still, Levy is reasonably troubled both by the court order and the ability of Ubervita to use such a ruling to stifle critical speech.

I give credit to Atkins for promptly responding to my expression of concern by agreeing to limit his initial discovery efforts directed to Amazon; in my own mind I remain uncertain on whether he deliberately sought an overbroad order. It is apparent from his client's to use the early discovery order to bully its online critics, however, that Ubervita itself has the evil intent of suppressing all criticism.

Not only does it deserve condemnation for this conduct; you also have to wonder how good its products can be if success in the marketplace depends on suppression of criticism.

from the questionable-legality dept

There's some buzz in security circles today after it came out that a session at the upcoming Black Hat Conference entitled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget" by Michael McCord and Alexander Volynkin (both of whom work for Carnegie-Mellon University and CERT) had been pulled from the conference at the request of CMU.

A Black Hat spokeswoman told Reuters that the talk had been canceled at the request of lawyers for Carnegie-Mellon University, where the speakers work as researchers. A CMU spokesman had no immediate comment.

There's been plenty of speculation about what's going on, but Chris Soghoian has a pretty good thesis that the researchers likely didn't have institutional approval or consent of the users they were identifying, meaning that they were potentially violating wiretapping statutes. As he notes, running a Tor server to try to spy on Tor traffic without talking to lawyers is a very bad idea. While it hasn't yet been confirmed that this is what happened, it certainly is a pretty sensible theory.

Of course, none of that changes the fact that it's possible to identify some Tor users. But... that's also not particularly new. In fact, we've discussed in the past how the feds can identify Tor users. Tor adds an important layer of protection, but there are plenty of ways that you can still be identified while using Tor. Just ask Russ Ulbricht. The problem isn't so much Tor itself but how people use it -- and the simple fact is that most people use it in a way that will eventually reveal who they are. While it's not definite, it seems likely that this is what the talk would have revealed. Shutting it down wasn't any sort of big attempt to cover up this fact, but perhaps it was to protect the researchers and CMU (potentially) from a lawsuit for violating wiretapping laws.

from the good-move dept

Three years ago, we criticized Google for going down the same mistaken path as other social networks with a "real names" policy for its Google+ system. We pointed out how Friendster had made this mistake in 2003 and Facebook had also similarly focused on such policies in 2007 (through today), without recognizing the importance of enabling anonymity and pseudonymity. While some people insist that "real names" guarantees a higher level of conversation and/or participation, there is little evidence to support that. We've long seen on our own site that many of the most useful and insightful comments come from anonymous users. And people using their real names will often say some really dumb things.

While it's easy for some people to insist that there's no big deal here, the stories of people negatively impacted by such a policy were very moving. Stories about people who had been abused or stalked, fearing being re-discovered by their tormenters. Stories of transgender people who had not "come out" to co-workers, but were "forced" to. Stories of people trying to hide from death threats. These were not minor issues. Google adjusted its policy somewhat, but not entirely.

When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.

Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.

We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.﻿

I still think that the company should have done this from the very beginning, but kudos to it for eventually coming around and recognizing that "real names" is a bad policy that can have serious unintended consequences -- and that letting people use pseudonyms is not a bad thing.

Was Blog for Arizona out of line for outing John Huppenthal as an anonymous commenter, as Mr. Geigner suggests in his recent post?

In this specific case, absolutely not. Among other things, Huppenthal invited us to publish his comments; he was so careless that his identity could be ascertained from the comments themselves, with no reference to the IP addresses we had, and he was posting from a government agency, which would be required to divulge the sites he visited if asked.

Let's put all that aside and approach the more fundamental question: How secure should a John Huppenthal be in his anonymity? He cited the Founding Fathers, several of who wrote anonymously when penning the Federalist Papers.

But the issue here is not the right to anonymous speech. Nobody disputes that right. The issue is whether there is a right to anonymous speech with zero risk of being exposed, even if the speaker is a public figure.

In our judicial system, very few rights are absolute. Why? Because there are competing interests.

For example, public figures do not receive the same level of protection from defamatory statements as ordinary citizens do. If I publish an unfavorable statement against Joe Sixpack, Joe only need show the statement was false in a suit for defamation. But if I make the same statement about an elected official, he has to show not only that the statement was false, but that I made it with reckless disregard for the truth. Why the difference? Because of the competing interest. As a society we don't want people with information about public figures to be overly fearful of coming forward.

If we were to attempt absolute protection of the anonymity of public figures in their online comments, we necessarily would have to encroach upon the freedom of the press and the associated protection of confidentiality of sources. Suppose Blog for Arizona did not expose Huppenthal directly, but instead had one of our writers speak off the record to a reporter, who then called Huppenthal out based on a confidential source and asked Huppenthal to request that Blog for Arizona publicize all its information. Huppenthal would have no practical choice but to comply, or just fess up. So, unless we're willing to encroach upon the freedom of the press, the protection of anonymous commenters could not be complete to the degree Mr. Geigner desires.

Now, consider the issue from the perspective of the blogger. I have knowledge that an elected official who is up for re-election, John Huppenthal, is a racist who believes the Holocaust was more the work of Darwin than of Hitler. Should I have no ability to let the public know what Huppenthal is all about? Perhaps, but only if Blog for Arizona and I had guaranteed Mr. Huppenthal that his anonymity would be protected. Otherwise, imposing some sort of legal gag order on bloggers does not seem the way to go.

The bottom line: We don't need to make it any easier for creeps like John Huppenthal to go undetected. A risk of detection is inherent in anonymous speech. Whatever chilling effect arises from the outing of a Huppenthal, a chilling effect that I submit is minor or non-existent, is outweighed by the value to the public of the outing.

from the nobody-to-defend dept

While we've talked in the past about whether or not a blog or publication should out a previously anonymous commenter if the outting would be newsworthy, it's worth noting that there was no real consensus reached amongst the venerated Techdirt community. Some of us think that there might be room for such a move. Others, such as myself, take more of a hard line approach to protecting anonymity (see the comments section in the link above for what I'd say is a really nice discussion on the question). Either way, with the widespread blogosphere and public participation in online communities only ratcheting ever-higher, it's useful to bring stories to the table to discuss how this all works when such events do occur.

This latest example is about John Huppenthal, Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction and apparent frequent anonymous commenter at Blog For Arizona. Bob Lord, of BFA, recently penned a post that outs Huppenthal for his previously anonymous and simultaneously insane comments on the site.

Okay, for the few of you who have not figured this out yet, by all indication our friend Thucky is John Huppenthal, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, which is the fifth highest elected office in the state. This may be a first. I don't know of any other elected official who has led a double life as a serial blog troll besides John Huppenthal. Chalk that up to Arizona having the market cornered on political craziness, I guess.

The post then outs Huppenthal for commenting anonymously there, on other conservative sites, and for creating duplicate handles all over the place in order to fake some kind of consensus around what he says. And what he was saying, analysis indicates, is batshit crazy. Such as:

-"bat shit crazy stuff"!!! Its in Obamas book, Obama said he was born in Kenya!!!! If this were a Republican, you would be going nuts demanding those college records.

-Hitler worked to eliminate the Jews. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood was given the job of eliminating African Americans. Hitler fed 6 million Jews into the ovens. Sanger has fed 16 million African Americans into the abortion mills.

-No spanish radio stations, no spanish billboards, no spanish tv, no spanish newspapers. This is America, speak English.

Now, it's worth noting that Huppenthal has since acknowledged that he did indeed make those comments under several different names, speaking of and to himself in the third person. That acknowledgement was followed up with something about believing in public discourse, regretting certain inflammatory words (Hitler! Kenya!), but hoping that we should all recognize that our great country has a long history of anonymous speech from politicians.

And...I happen to think he's right on that last point. Look, Huppenthal is a blowhard, fact-ignoring caricature of a politician on one end of the political spectrum. He's not representative of anything other than his own idiocy, but the sites he went to offered anonymous commenting and then pulled the rug out from under him when they decided that his commenting was a story. They're not wrong; Huppenthal's online antics and self-sock-puppetry is indeed a story, but does that story outweigh the fallout from the removal of anonymity? I would say no. Others, including other writers here at Techdirt, might say yes. I'm more interested in what you all think, anonymous or otherwise.

from the don't-mess-it-up dept

We've written many times about the importance of protection against secondary liability for websites, such that they're not held liable for what their users do. In the US, thankfully, we have Section 230 of the CDA, which clearly states that websites cannot be held liable for speech made by their users. Frankly, we shouldn't need such a law, because it should be obvious: you don't blame the site for the comments made by others. That's just a basic question of properly placing liability on those responsible. But, in a world of Steve Dallas lawsuits, in which people will always sue companies with deep pockets, it makes sense to have explicit safe harbors to stop bogus litigation.

Somehow, with so much focus on the importance of secondary liability, we happened to miss an absolutely insane ruling that came out of the European Court of Human Rights last fall, in the case of Delfi AS v. Estonia, which basically said that any website that allows comments can be liable for those comments. In fact, it found that even when sites took down comments (automatically!) following complaints, they can still be liable, because they should have blocked those comments from going up in the first place. Bizarrely, the court basically says the site should have known that the article in question might lead to negative reactions, and therefor should have blocked comments:

In addressing this question, the Court first examined the context of the comments. Although the Court acknowledged that the news article itself was balanced and addressed a matter of public interest, it considered that Delfi “could have realised that it might cause negative reactions against the shipping company and its managers”. It also considered that there was “a higher-than-average risk that the negative comments could go beyond the boundaries of acceptable criticism and reach the level of gratuitous insult or hate speech.” Accordingly, the Court concluded that Delfi should have exercised particular caution in order to avoid liability.

Next, the Court examined the steps taken by Delfi to deal with readers’ comments. In particular, the Court noted that Delfi had put in place a notice-and-takedown system and an automatic filter based on certain ‘vulgar’ words. The Court concluded that the filter, in particular, was “insufficient for preventing harm being cause to third parties’. Although the notice-and-takedown system was easy to use - it did not require anything more than clicking on a reporting button – and the comments had been removed immediately notice had been received, the comments had been accessible to the public for six weeks.

The Court considered that the applicant company “was in a position to know about an article to be published, to predict the nature of the possible comments prompted by it and, above all, to take technical or manual measures to prevent defamatory statements from being made public”.

Even more troubling for those of us who believe in the importance and value of unregistered and anonymous commenting, the court found those features to be particularly problematic:

By allowing comments to be made by non-registered users, Delfi had assumed a certain responsibility for them. The Court further noted that “the spread of the Internet and the possibility – or for some purposes the danger – that information once made public will remain public and circulate forever, calls for caution”. In the Court’s view, it was a daunting task at the best of times – including for the applicant - to identify and remove defamatory comments. It would be even more onerous for a potentially injured person, “who would be less likely to possess resources for continual monitoring of the Internet”.

The reason that we're bringing this up now is because plenty of folks, quite rightly, freaked out about this ruling, and asked the European Court of Human Rights to reconsider. And that's now going to happen in early July. The Financial Times has a long and quite interesting look at the case and related issues, including a discussion at the beginning about the nature of online comments. For many years we've talked up the value of anonymous comments and how wonderful they've been for our community here. We've always taken an exceptionally light touch to moderation, allowing anyone to comment, and just trying to weed out the spam. And it's worked well for us. A ruling like the one above doesn't directly impact us, seeing as we're an American company with all our servers here, but it's immensely troubling in general and could create widespread chilling effects on any site that relies on user generated content. But it goes beyond that:

For Eric Barendt, Goodman Professor of Media Law at University College London from 1990 until 2010, the ruling doesn’t adequately balance freedom of speech against an individual’s right to protect his or her reputation. “I wouldn’t stick my neck out to say the ECtHR’s judgment was ridiculous,” he tells me, “but I know many people who would. How bizarre that this case could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

The judgment will not only affect whistleblowers, says Aidan Eardley, a London-based barrister specialising in data protection and media-related human rights law. “It’s also bad news for people who want to comment about sensitive personal issues such as domestic abuse, sexual identity, religious persecution, etc.”

As Sarah Laitner, the FT’s communities editor, says: “It’s important to remove any hurdles a reader may face to participation. Some people feel that they are able to comment more freely if they can use a pseudonym.”

On July 9th, the Court will reconsider its original ruling, and for the sake of free speech online, we hope it reverses its earlier ruling. Between this and the recent right to be forgotten ruling in the EU Court of Justice, Europe is quickly becoming a dangerous free speech nightmare. While these rulings may have the best of intentions, the wider impact of both can do an astounding job in stifling public participation and comment.

from the anonymous-speech-is-important dept

Two years ago, we wrote about a bizarre legal fight in which Escape Media, the company behind Grooveshark, was trying to force the blog Digital Music News to unveil an anonymous commenter who had commented on Grooveshark's ongoing lawsuit with Universal Music. The comment claimed to be from a Grooveshark employee, though it seemed like the typical unsourced, improbable junk you'll often find in certain anonymous comments -- difficult to take seriously. And yet Escape Media issued a subpoena demanding Digital Music News reveal the commenter's information. While I actually thought that Escape Media had a reasonable legal argument against the labels, we found this particular effort to unveil an anonymous commenter quite troubling. Similarly, while I often disagree with the opinions written on Digital Music News, I respect Paul Resnikoff, who runs the site, and actually helped put him in touch with Paul Levy from Public Citizen to respond to the subpoena.

A year ago, we were disappointed to see a trial court side with Grooveshark and order DMN "preserve" logs that had long ago been deleted in the regular course of DMN running its business. Even worse, the court wanted DMN to hand over its server hard drives for Grooveshark to try to do a forensic analysis of the deleted data to see if it could identify the deleted information about the commenter. DMN appealed the ruling and a California state appeals court has overturned the original ruling -- but did so for reasons other than Levy and DMN had suggested.

Levy and DMN had argued, quite reasonably, that the First Amendment barred revealing the anonymous commenter and also that since the data had already been deleted in the regular course of business, that it cannot be required to preserve servers that might possibly have that data hidden somewhere. Instead, the court ruled in a different manner, saying that the commenter's identity could be protected, but because of California's constitutional privacy protections:

Even if Visitor’s identifying information was reasonably calculated to lead to
admissible evidence, his or her right to privacy under the California Constitution would
outweigh Escape’s need for the information. “The right to speak anonymously draws
its strength from two separate constitutional wellsprings: the First Amendment’s freedom
of speech and the right of privacy in article I, section 1 of the California Constitution.”
.... The
California Constitution provides that all people have a right of privacy.... This express right is broader than the implied federal right to privacy.... The California privacy
right “protects the speech and privacy rights of individuals who wish to promulgate their
information and ideas in a public forum while keeping their identities secret,” and “limits
what courts can compel through civil discovery.”

Perhaps even more interesting is that Justice Victoria Chaney appears to channel XKCD in pointing out that we can't just go around willy-nilly identifying people online just because you don't like what they say:

Visitor has done nothing
more than provide commentary about an ongoing public dispute in a forum that could
hardly be more obscure—the busy online comments section of a digital trade newspaper.
Such commentary has become ubiquitous on the Internet and is widely perceived to carry
no indicium of reliability and little weight. We will not lightly lend the subpoena power
of the courts to prove, in essence, that Someone Is Wrong On The Internet.

from the where-will-it-end? dept

As we've reported, Russia has been steadily trying to bring the Internet under control with ever-more stringent measures. After tackling general Web sites through powers that allow them to be blocked more easily, it now seems to be the turn of the bloggers, as this report from the ITAR-TASS News Agency on a recently-approved law explains:

The law introduces a new term: "Internet user called blogger." Bloggers will be obliged to declare their family name and initials and e-mail address. Those authors whose personal website or page in social networks has 3,000 visitors or more a day must have themselves registered on a special list and abide by restrictions applicable to the mass media. In other words, registration requires the blogger should check the authenticity of published information and also mention age restrictions for users. Also, bloggers will have to follow mass media laws concerning electioneering, resistance to extremism and the publication of information about people’s private lives. An abuse of these requirements will be punishable with a fine of 10,000 to 30,000 rubles (roughly $300 to $1,000) for individuals and 300,000 rubles ($10,000) for legal entities. A second violation will be punishable with the website's suspension for one month.

Clearly those onerous conditions are designed to make any blogger think twice or three times before publishing anything at all controversial or embarrassing for the authorities. The article notes that the new law may be challenged before Russia's Constitutional Court, and that there's a huge loophole in the form of blogs located overseas, which are not covered by the legislation. The fear has to be that the Russian government will now move on to blocking them too. Moreover, not content with intimidating independent blogs, the Russian authorities also seem to be tightening their grip on VKontakte, the Russian Facebook. As Ars Technica reports:

Pavel Durov, the founder of Vkontakte (VK) -- the largest social network in Russia -- said on Tuesday that he fled the country one day after being forced out of the company, claiming that he felt threatened by Kremlin officials.

In a post on his profile page on Monday, Durov explained that he was fired from his position as CEO of VK and that the so-called "Russian Facebook" is now "under the complete control" of two oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin.

His removal is probably connected with his longstanding refusal to censor content on VKontakte:

Durov explained that after seven years of relative social media freedom in Russia, his refusal to share user data with Russian law enforcement has set him at odds with the Kremlin, which has recently been trying to tighten its grip on the Internet, according to The Moscow Times.

VK's former CEO says that despite his multiple refusals of Kremlin requests to censor his site in a similar fashion to how it filters print and TV news, the site -- which boasts 143 million registered users globally, 88 million of whom are based in Russia -- is now effectively under state control.

What's sad here is that, as we've noted ruefully before, in the wake of revelations about NSA and GCHQ spying, the West is no longer in a position to criticize this kind of censorship and surveillance. As the latest moves indicate, the Russian authorities seem intent on taking full advantage of that fact.